Mythologue

@BrockSmith I doubt that'll happen. AI really isn't good enough to be able to replace the range of a genuine, authentic actor. That's to say nothing of motion capture. It'll be employed in some areas, probably, but VAs are always going to be a thing and I'm convinced that they're always going to outnumber AI at least 10 to 1.

@lightningbolt79 I'm not even really that excited about Spiderman 2. Sony seems to believe that the future of their platform is live services, which have been shown to be quite unreliable, not to mention generally pretty poor. Yeah, they need games badly, because this generation has probably been the absolute worst, going all the way back to the fifth.

Thousands of items is good until you realise that a lot of them are just filler. If we're being honest here, these sales usually have between 20 and 30 games actually worth checking out.

I'm glad that this is returning, finally. Although I'd question to whom this is really going to appeal. Most of us probably get a feel for general consensus from aggregates like on Metacritic and user reviews from Steam (which, in my opinion, still has the superior rating system out of all the ecosystems).

Maybe it's just me but, do these charts really mean anything? GTAV, Mario Kart 8, Pikmin 1 and 2, Minecraft? Are there, like, 30 games total in the charts or something?

Very much looking forward to starting BG3 soon. I've also been playing DA:I on Steam. Started AI recently but it'll unfortunately have to make way for BG now.

Larian are treating this game like Hello treated NMS. This game isn't even broken as far as I know (thanks, early access). That is some quite admirable commitment.

I haven't checked it but I imagine it'll probably look like;

Elden Ring
The Witcher 3
Persona 5

I don't think any of them exceed 100 hours though. Oh, and there's also RS2014 but Steam is my choice of platform for that game for...obvious reasons I won't mention here. Close to 1,000 hours. Probably my most played game ever.

It seems to be a reflection of the games industry in general. It's become so sterile and stagnant that one of the mentioned items here is DLC for a remake of a game. Does no one else see that as depressing? Two of the four items listed, in fact, are remakes or reboots. I mean, c'mon, is innovation just plain dead?

The game never quite sat right with me. ZD was good and I could get through it, primarily because it was a mysterious and curious world where you would spend time gradually unravelling its secrets. FW was a sequel, following the sequel bait of its predecessor, and it was just an unnecessary game overall.

I also never really got how Aloy is such an appealing mascot to so many. She always struck me as flat and emotionless. Needless to say, I couldn't complete FW. I can't see a scenario where I'd find myself playing the inevitable third entry either. One was enough.

It's refreshing to hear a developer mention game length where they boast about it being in excess of 20 hours rather than 200. I think 15 to 30 hours is a sweet spot for games of this nature. The Evil Within 2 was maybe 15 to 20 hours long and it was honestly a pretty decent length. It didn't drag but it also felt like it had plenty of content.

Bloodborne definitely ranks in my top ten but Elden Ring quite easily dethroned it and became one of my top three or top five games of all time. I think my absolute favourite game would probably be Half-Life 2 or Silent Hill 2 though. I don't think any game has yet been able to match the atmosphere of either, which is a testament to their quality considering how they're around two decades old.

@rjejr It has more than 250,000 reviews on Steam and scored a 95.

I expected no less than a 9/10 and I'm not in the slightest surprised that it scored a solid, legendary 10/10.

With that being said, and although I'm absolutely looking forward to it and will certainly be getting it very soon, I was recently playing DOS to prepare and found that I simply could not get into that game at all. I'm hoping that this is different enough, because otherwise it might just not sit right with me.

That aside, I really hope that this becomes a new standard and thoroughly upsets the present games industry. It's become entirely creatively bankrupt to the very core, and this is exactly what it needs. Just like Elden Ring before it, perplex the AAA developers and publishers and force them to actually rethink their approach to design.

@Ravix I'm not aware of the quality (I'd wait for Steam reviews and a complete Metacritic profile and ranking before deciding), but I'd recommend just buying / upgrading a PC.

Other than that, I'd probably make the shift to Xbox if I could, solely because I'm absolutely starved for games on the PS5 right now. That being said, that's based on my experience and it'll differ from person to person, naturally.

My philosophy is that if the game isn't a fun concept without VR, it probably won't be any more entertaining with VR. Keep Talking was fun because it wasn't just the VR that made it entertaining. It was a generally cool concept, with or without the hardware.

This, on the other hand, looks pretty bland and generic. Developers are really trying to push for the hardware to work, but they seem to be sacrificing any actual fun as a result. The breadth of the games selection, which usually seems to be little more than just "shoot things" or "escape room", isn't going to lead to any radical innovation.

@deathaxe BG3 is currently £49.99 on Steam. It's £57.99 on PS Store.

I dropped the subscription not long ago. Price hike or no, I just didn't see any value in it, in all fairness.

I can't say this is helping any. People who are on the fence are probably having their minds made up right now.

I don't think it's such a bad premise but you're sandwiching yourself in between Switch and Steam Deck when it comes to handheld options. There's simply no competition.

No open world AND no endless post-game? It's sounding better every time I hear about it.

I never could tell if subscription services were fated to an early demise or if they'd end up becoming a mainstay for most platforms. At the end of the day, I just can't envision either of them surviving, especially if there's a serious, obstinate reticence to adopt day one releases. At this point, I kinda hope they just die off entirely.

My expectations for announcements and future games are so low at this point that I don't even know if I'm capable of being disappointed anymore.

@AdamNovice Elden Ring did cause some uproar, in fact. Look up the criticisms leveraged by UI/UX designers, if only for a look into how out of touch the AAA games industry is these days.

After the release of BG3, I don't think I'm going to be excited for all that much (console-wise) for quite a few months, if not years. I've been slowly turning my attention to PC gaming, and seeing how s&box is shaping up.

I couldn't bring myself to finish Judgment. It's a perfectly fine game, but after storming through all of the Yakuza games, I think I had enough. There just wasn't enough new stuff there to keep me hooked, and the characters don't hold a candle to the originals. I'm happy setting aside PS+ for now, anyway, and buying games outright.

I wish remasters in general would just die off. They're usually pretty blatant cash grabs.

I've been playing the Pathfinder game that I got as part of the Humble Bundle deal, to try and get me into the mindset of thorough and complex RPGs. I like to think I'm ready for this. Well, I hope...

@Cashews With all due respect, he tried that before, and he was indicted for it. It was notably worse than what's being discussed in this article.

Baldur's Gate 3. Possibly the first game I've been genuinely excited for in more than three years. If it's anything like what the critics (and early access Steam reviews) claim, it's going to be a veritable landmark in RPGs.

The first game on Steam is a lot of fun and usually pretty cheap, I think. It's a good way to enter the franchise without having to worry about a huge investment cost. I'd recommend it for anyone who wants to try it in VR, just as a quick taster.

I've seen this exact aesthetic in science fiction probably around two dozen times or more. I can't be the only one who's just absolutely sick to death of it at this point, surely? What happened to that cool, blocky retro future like in Alien Isolation? That raygun gothic appeal of Fallout?

Should've asked for the best deuteragonist. IMO the protagonists always take second place to their allies.

I find that this is fairly common, especially in the mobile market, where untested developers rely on existing brands to push their own abysmal games. The Day Before is another, using a title that resembles Days Gone, and a typeface that conjures images of TLoU. It's deliberate. It also goes without saying that the developers are practically never competent, and usually just con artists.

There's nothing wrong with large, sprawling games, but at least populate it with meaningful stories instead of tired, exhausting, repetitive fetch quests and collectibles. There are precisely zero developers who can keep a 100+ hour game fresh. Just give us linear adventures with semi-open environments, that last around 10 to 20 hours. I don't know why that's such a taboo these days.

@Cordyceps Lord Doctor Traine of Fopsley-Bealestone

It's a shame that MM are often overlooked solely on account of how niche their games are. Dreams would've absolutely slayed on PC, with an extensive modding community and a suite of FOSS tools.

I don't know how many people are a fan of cringe comedy. I mean, it can be done right, but you need very good writers to make it work. I can't see this pushing through to a renewal.

I own Diablo 4 and play with my partner. It's a lot of fun. The main problem is that you always sense the "live service" air hanging over the whole experience. To even start the game, both of us had to log in to Blizzard, use a code, then link accounts. It was about three to five minutes for each of us, but playing a dark fantasy and being immediately prompted to "log in and enter this code" is a huge mood killer. A damn shame, too, because I think we both enjoy the cinematics and general underpinnings of the game.

@LifeGirl They should really be spending less on games. I can't say I'm an expert in business management and finances, but wouldn't it make more sense to develop smaller, cheaper projects, market them for less, develop and release more, and rely on the sheer quantity of sales to keep them afloat within the same time window? What's this obsession with excessive production value anyway?

IIRC Skate actually began as a Criterion project, before it was offloaded to Black Box. It's a pretty decent series of games, but (from what I remember) incredibly tricky. I can't picture myself playing this, though. It's got flop written all over it. Skate in nought but name.

The best games usually seem to be somewhere between five and 20 hours in length. The greatest RPG games will often have you wrapping up the story in around 40 hours. Anything more than that, it just becomes exhausting, needless padding.

That might just be the case, but I'm of the opinion that this is just Ubisoft's MO these days. They don't seem to be able to focus on anything outside of their usual purview. Namely, AC, Far Cry, and The Crew. Even Rocksmith took a huge hit with their seemingly distracted, divided attention. Still sore about that one...

I sense the possibility of mass redundancies in the very near future.

Pikmin isn't surprising, although I hadn't even heard of a fourth game. It's a fantastic franchise. The first one is still mightily nostalgic to me, perhaps even more so than Crash.

A new IP would be nice. Installments and re-releases within existing franchises feels a little stagnant.

@Kanji-Tatsumi I'd recommend holding off a little longer. There isn't really any reason to rush into the current generation just yet, since we still seem to be in the interim between the PS4 and PS5.

It's a shame that so many gamers seem to assume that open world game side quests necessarily have to be needless filler. We're so far from the days of Fallout, Fable, and The Witcher, which populated their worlds with all flavours of stories and quirky characters, that it seems most of us have forgotten what actual side content should look like. FF16 could be a fantastic experience, but I just can't move past this. It's anathema for game design, and it's a plague on the AAA industry.

Another live service game to throw into the ever growing mass grave of live service games, just tumbling off into the abyss like lemmings.

Looking forward to Call of Duty 20: Modern Warfare 3 2

Always viewed Apple TV as kinda meh, probably one of the weaker services out there, struggling to keep up with Disney, Netflix, Now, and possibly even Prime in terms of USPs. Nonetheless, I'll see if my partner wants to watch anything on there. That's half a year of experimentation for nothing, so why not?

The one thing that's missing from my games; feeling like I'm at death's door while I'm playing them. Ubisoft, once again nailing the superfluous instead of developing high quality IPs. Never change.